The research examined employees and stakeholders' perceptions of a significant educational reform conducted at the A. Youth-Village. The reform aimed at transforming an out-dated agriculture school into a technological-scientific education centre that would be able to train its pupils to meet the challenges of the 21st century. This study investigated the employees and stakeholders' perceptions of the appropriateness of methods used during the organisational change of A. Youth-Village. The studied perceptions related, amongst other issues, to the extent of the respondents’ knowledge about the latest changes introduced, their respective present and future positions in the A. Youth-Village, the impact of the changes on their professional careers, and the necessity for change (Samuel, 2005). The research employed mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate different variables relating to the management of the A. Youth-Village, derived from background conversations with stakeholders' and a review of the relevant literature on traditional management theory. Data analysis was adapted to the different research methods, including statistics and content analysis. Five main categories emerged from the data analysis as important considerations for the management of the A. Youth-Village: (1) Personal Attitude (2) Quality Professional Development (3) Quality Management Approach (4) Quality Consumer Satisfaction and (5) Personal Improvement. These five categories used to form an innovative managerial theory (Ed.QMS), which can serve as an operative management model that would be appropriate to the needs of the A. Youth-Village during and after the implementation of change. The new theory and model embodies an addition to traditional management theory and despite the difficulties involved in generalisation due to the unique nature of the studied institution, it may be relevant and helpful for other boarding technological and agricultural schools.

The extensive use of global teams to develop software has prompted researchers to investigate various factors that can enhance a team’s performance. While a significant body of research exists on global software teams, previous research has not fully explored the interrelationships and collective impact of various factors on team performance. This study explored a model that added the characteristics of a team’s culture, ability, communication frequencies, response rates, and linguistic categories to a central framework of team performance. Data was collected from two student software development projects that occurred between teams located in the United States, Panama, and Turkey. The data was obtained through online surveys and recorded postings of team activities that occurred throughout the global software development projects. Partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) was chosen as the analytic technique to test the model and identify the most influential factors. Individual factors associated with response rates and linguistic characteristics proved to significantly affect a team’s activity related to grade on the project, group cohesion, and the number of messages received and sent. Moreover, an examination of possible latent homogeneous segments in the model supported the existence of differences among groups based on leadership style. Teams with assigned leaders tended to have stronger relationships between linguistic characteristics and team performance factors, while teams with emergent leaders had stronger. Relationships between response rates and team performance factors. The contributions in this dissertation are three fold. 1) Novel analysis techniques using PLS-PM and clustering, 2) Use of new, quantifiable variables in analyzing team activity, 3) Identification of plausible causal indicators for team performance and analysis of the same.

In the United States, an aging and overburdened urban infrastructure has become a substantial challenge for civil engineers. Among these challenges, systems for stormwater management are of significant concern, considering their direct impact on environmental quality, local ecosystems, and the hydrologic cycle. Given the high costs for rehabilitation of traditional stormwater infrastructure in urban settings, low impact, or "green" development strategies have become critical components in plans for meeting future stormwater management goals. In particular, New York City (NYC) has pledged $1.5 billion over the next 20 years to improve environmental quality through the mitigation of urban runoff, where utilization of green infrastructure is a primary goal. Cost effective implementation of this, and similar plans around the world, requires comprehensive understanding of green infrastructure functionality. In response, this dissertation investigates the stormwater management potential of full-scale green roofs in NYC through lenses of observation, modeling, and design. Exploration of this topic has resulted in new findings which quantify the: influence of dominant environmental and physical properties on green roof hydrologic performance, envelope of potential green roof rainfall capture in NYC, and predictive efficiency of contemporary hydrologic models for green roof assessment. This work has also lead to new methods for the: extension of green roof observations to account for the influence of rainfall distribution, parameterization of green roof hydrologic processes, and prediction of full-scale green roof rainfall capture in advance of construction. Going forward, these findings and methods are useful for informing green roof policy, planning, and design; where, in particular, this information supports the development of green roof policies that correlate to specific stormwater management goals. In summation, the characterization of green roof stormwater management in NYC, as presented in this dissertation, has contributed to the understanding of, among other topics, green roof design, urban stormwater management, hydrologic modeling, and the broad interdisciplinary field of urban ecological systems.

The conversion of natural landscapes for human use over the past century has led to significant ecological consequences. By clearing tropical forests, intensifying agriculture and expanding urban centers, human actions have transformed local, regional and global hydrology. Urban landscapes, designed and built atop impervious surfaces, inhibit the natural infiltration of rainfall into the subsurface. Deforestation, driven by the demand for natural resources and food production, alters river flow and regional climate. These land cover changes have manifested into a number of water management challenges, from the city to the watershed scale, and motivated investment into landscape re-greening programs. This movement has prompted the need for monitoring, evaluation and prediction of the hydrological benefits of re-greening. The research presented in this dissertation assesses the contribution of different re-greening strategies to water resources management, from multiple scales. Specifically, re-greening at the city scale is investigated through the study of vegetated rooftops (green roofs) in a dense urban environment. Re-greening at the watershed scale is investigated through the study of forest regeneration on deforested and ecologically degraded land in the tropics. First, the benefits of city re-greening for urban water management are investigated through monitoring and modeling the hydrological behavior of a number of green roofs in New York City (NYC). Influence of green roof size and rainfall characteristics on a green roof’s ability to retain/ detain rainwater are explored and the ability of a soil infiltration model to predict green roof hydrology is assessed. Findings from this work present insight regarding green roof design optimization, which has utility for scientific researchers, architects, and engineers. Next, a cost effective tool is developed that can be used to evaluate green roof hydrologic performance, citywide. This tool, termed the Soil Water Apportioning Method (SWAM), generates green roof runoff and evapotranspiration based on minimally measured parameters. SWAM is validated using measured runoff from three extensive green roofs in NYC. Additional to green roofs, there is potential for SWAM to be used in the hydrologic performance evaluation of other types of green infrastructure, making SWAM a relevant tool for city planners and agencies as well as for researchers from various disciplines of study. Finally, the impact of degraded landscape re-greening is investigated using a case study of 15 watersheds in Puerto Rico that have experienced extensive reforestation. The study provides evidence of improved soil conditions following reforestation, which in effect positively impacts streamflow generation processes. Findings from this work fill a gap in knowledge regarding the hydrological benefits of forest regeneration in mesoscale watersheds and provide guidance for future investment into reforestation programs. Land cover will inevitably continue to change to meet the needs of a growing and increasingly urban population. Yet there is potential to offset some of the ecological effects – especially those on hydrology – that result from land cover change. As a whole, this dissertation aims to contribute knowledge that can be used to make the re-greening of altered landscapes more realizable.

A changing climate may portend increasing disaster risk across many countries and business enterprises. While many aspects of the hazards, exposure and vulnerability that constitute disaster risk have been well studied, several challenges remain. A critical aspect that needs to be addressed is the rapid response and recovery from a climate-induced disaster. Often, governments need to allocate funds or design financial instruments that can be activated rapidly to mobilize response and recovery. The proposed research addresses this general problem, focusing on a few selected issues. First, there is the question of how to rapidly detect and index a climate hazard, such as a flood, given proxy remote sensing data on attributes that may be closely related to the hazard. The second is the need to robustly estimate the return periods of extreme climate hazards, and the temporal changes in their projected frequency of occurrence using multi-century climate proxies. The third is the need to assess the potential losses from the event, including the disruption of services, and cascading failure of interlinked infrastructure elements. The fourth is the impact on global and regional supply chains that are induced by the event, and the associated financial impact. For each of these cases, it is useful to ground an analysis and the development of an approach around real world examples, which can then collectively inform a strategy for emergency response. Here, this will be pursued through an analysis of flooding in the Philippines, livestock mortality induced by drought and freezing winter in Mongolia, Hurricane Sandy impacts in New York, supply chain impacts in Thailand, and an end to end analysis of the potential process using data from Thailand and Bangladesh. Collectively, these analyses are expected to inform climate hazard planning and securitization processes with broad applicability at a regional to national level.

Thesis (MTech (Business Information Systems))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2018. / Many software organisations using iterative software development approach use practices that relate to quality management. However, the quality management process has been inadequate. Despite many research studies conducted on quality management in iterative software product development none have adequately addressed the challenges and mitigation techniques to have an adequate process that leads to a quality software product. The objective of this study was to determine factors that affect the quality management process in iterative software development. The research followed a qualitative approach, a case of software organisation SasTech in Cape Town, South Africa. 22 interviews were conducted on three roles actively involved in the software product development process. These are product management, quality assurance and software developers. Themes were drawn from results and were tabulated. The duality of technology theory was used as a theoretical lens to data analysis. Several factors were identified to influence the software quality management process. These include planning, documentation, process ownership, technologies, testing, timelines and management support. Through the general proposed framework, facilities (human resources and technologies), interpretive schemes (architecture) and norms (practices) of software quality management can be institutionalised leading to adequate and effective quality management in iterative development for SasTech as well as other organisations in the same industry.

Abstract not available

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D. (Business administration))-University of Pretoria, 2004. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (doctoral)--Technische Hochschule, Aachen, 2005.